Law
US Criminal Procedure
US Criminal Procedure refers to the legal process that governs the investigation and prosecution of criminal offenses in the United States. It encompasses the rules and regulations that law enforcement agencies, prosecutors, and courts must follow when handling criminal cases, including search and seizure, arrest, interrogation, and trial procedures. The procedures are designed to protect the rights of the accused and ensure fair treatment under the law.
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8 Key excerpts on "US Criminal Procedure"
eBook - PDF- Beth Walston-Dunham(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Cengage Learning EMEA(Publisher)
It differs signifi-cantly from civil procedure. Of course, the obvious difference is that rules of civil procedure govern civil actions and rules of criminal procedure govern criminal prosecutions. In addition, criminal procedure comes into play long before the action is formally commenced against a defendant. Criminal procedure affects the prosecution from the moment a crime is suspected. Criminal prosecutions take place in both the federal and state judicial systems, each of which has its own rules of procedure. However, all are ultimately governed by certain constitutional requirements. Through its var-ious amendments, the U.S. Constitution protects all persons from unfair and unequal treatment during criminal prosecution. The courts vigorously enforce the Constitution and require that all persons be treated fairly and equally. Therefore, although the rules may differ somewhat from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, the effect of the rules must be constitutionally permissible or the rules may be invalidated by the courts. This chapter provides a limited introduction to the constitutional limitations on criminal procedure, the cur-rent status of criminal procedure, and the stages of a criminal prosecution. Keep in mind that because the law is subject to radical changes as the courts review various procedural rules and judge their constitutionality, only basic principles are discussed here—and even they may be subject to change. CRIMINAL PROCEDURE AND THE CONSTITUTION The first 10 amendments to the United States Constitution are amazing texts. Individuals who did not have the benefit of electricity, motorized travel, or even steam-generated power nevertheless had the wisdom and fore-sight to identify the basic rights necessary to create a fair system of government that would last for centuries.
eBook - PDFFoundations of Law
Cases, Commentary and Ethics
- Ransford Pyle, Carol Bast(Authors)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Cengage Learning EMEA(Publisher)
Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. 196 Chapter 8 THE CONSTITUTIONAL BASIS OF CRIMINAL PROCEDURE Although criminal procedure follows many of the patterns of civil procedure, there are major differences between them, largely because of the special provisions of the U.S. Constitution (which are usually echoed in state constitutions). The Constitution, and especially the first 10 amendments (the Bill of Rights), expresses a basic code of criminal procedure by enumerating rights of citizens against government intrusion and rights of those accused of crimes. The provisions of the Constitu-tion have been subjected to intense scrutiny by state and federal courts, particularly since the 1950s. Criminal procedure cannot be understood without reference to these rights. Exhibit 8-1 contains excerpts from the Constitution relevant to these rights. The terms italicized in Exhibit 8-1 are anno-tated or explained in the section following the exhibit. EXHIBIT 8-1 Excerpts from the Constitution of the United States ARTICLE I SECTION 9: 2. The privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it. 3. No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed. ARTICLE III SECTION 2: 3. The trial of all Crimes, except in Cases of Impeachment, shall be by Jury; and such Trial shall be held in the State where the said Crimes shall have been committed; but when not committed within any State, the Trial shall be at such Place or Places as the Congress may by Law have directed. AMENDMENT IV The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures; shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
eBook - PDFThe Least Dangerous Branch?
Consequences of Judicial Activism
- Stephen P. Powers, Stanley Rothman(Authors)
- 2002(Publication Date)
- Praeger(Publisher)
Chapter 6 The Courts and Criminal Procedure RIGHTS OF THE ACCUSED, CRIME, AND LAW ENFORCEMENT Among other amendments to the Constitution, the Fourth, Fifth, and Fourteenth were devised to protect citizens from arbitrary, capricious, and unreasonable gov- ernmental injury and/or intrusion in various criminal proceedings. They serve as procedural boundaries between the individual and the state. The judiciary's expan- sion of individual rights during the Warren Court era resulted in a substantial trans- formation of the meaning and force of these amendments. During this period the Supreme Court and the lower federal courts strengthened constitutional safe- guards against what they deemed unreasonable searches and seizures, prohibited the use of illegally obtained evidence at trial, required that defendants be informed of their rights to counsel and against self-incrimination, established a universal right of criminal defendants to the effective assistance of counsel, and broadened the meaning of cruel and unusual punishment. As in other areas of judicial inter- vention, critics have charged the courts with overreaching their authority in initiat- ing these important doctrinal shifts in criminal law. Indeed, the Supreme Court did play a pivotal role in bringing about monumental changes in the criminal justice system during and after the 1960s. Two key cases that we focus on in this chapter drastically altered state criminal trials. Mapp v. Ohio required the exclusion of evidence in many cases of warrantless searches, and Miranda v. Arizona required law-enforcement officers to inform suspects of their Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination. As Lucas Powe notes in his history of the Warren Court, "Mapp required half the states to change [their laws]. Miranda required all the states to change theirs" (Powe, 2000:394). These
eBook - PDF- Joel Samaha(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Cengage Learning EMEA(Publisher)
Constitution and the Bill of Rights. For example, every state constitution guarantees rights against self-incrimination and unreasonable searches and seizures, as well as the right to counsel and to jury trial. In addition to parallel rights, some state constitutions provide additional rights not specifically mentioned in the U.S. Constitution, such as the right to privacy. State courts are a source of criminal procedure law in two types of cases: (1) those that involve the U.S. Constitution that the U.S. Supreme Court hasn’t decided yet and (2) those involving their own state constitutions. In cases that involve the U.S. Con-stitution, state court decisions aren’t final, so they can be appealed to federal courts. Many cases excerpted in this book started in state courts and ended in the U.S. Supreme Court. But remember that in the real world of criminal procedure, most cases never get past state courts. State courts are the final authority in cases based on their own state constitutions and statutes. The federal courts—even the U.S. Supreme Court—can’t interpret state constitutions and statutes unless the state provisions and state courts interpreting them fail to meet the minimum standards set by the U.S. Constitution. In referring to this federal rights floor, a Supreme Court justice once said, “It doesn’t pay a law much of a compliment to declare it constitutional.” In other words, individual states are free to raise the minimum, and sometimes they do, but they’re banned from lowering the floor. Copyright 2018 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. WCN 02-300 40 CHAPTER 2 7 The tension between crime control and individual liberty and privacy that we dis-cussed in Chapter 1 has a long history. Roscoe Pound (the immensely influential legal scholar and early champion of the sociology of law), traced the Western history of what he maintained is a pendulum swing between them.
eBook - PDF- Kai Ambos, Antony Duff, Julian Roberts, Thomas Weigend, Alexander Heinze, Alexander Heinze(Authors)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
94 Allan conceives due process not as a purely procedural device nor even as a shield against abuse of state power. Rather it is integrally linked to a defensible substantive account of the content of law. Just as the criminal law defends the domain of individual liberty against predation by private citizens, so the criminal process sets ‘the proper limits of state authority’ 89 Ramraj, ‘Due Process’ (2004), 516. 90 Ibid., 516–23. 91 Ibid., 524. 92 Ibid. 93 Allan, ‘The Rule of Law’ (2016), 215. 94 Ibid., 219. in accordance with ‘a scheme of governance that, correctly interpreted, accords each individual the freedom that his human dignity demands’. 95 Tadros goes further to contend that procedure alone will not help if the substance of the law is unjust, so we need not only a right to a fair trial but a right to a fair criminal law. 96 His claim calls for closer attention to the inseparable relationship between criminal law and criminal process largely lacking from legal scholarship to-date. 97 As Roberts observes: [T]o the best of my knowledge, there has never been any grand conspiracy to keep Criminal Law Theory pure and uncontaminated by criminal procedure scholarship. Procedural issues have simply been ignored by the vast majority of card-carrying criminal law theorists. 98 A substantive account of due process would rectify this oversight by recognising that the justice of the process is indivisible from the justice of the criminal law – and vice versa. 99 5 Evasions and Erosions of Due Process This chapter has sought to elaborate due process values and principles largely in the abstract, but there are obvious hazards to normative theorising divorced from the messy realities of everyday practice. To do so risks valorising idealised accounts of due process that pay insufficient regard to the limits and frailties of criminal justice institutions and processes, human apathy, prejudice and capacity for error.
eBook - PDFForensic Science and Law
Investigative Applications in Criminal, Civil and Family Justice
- Cyril H. Wecht, John T. Rago, Cyril H. Wecht, John T. Rago(Authors)
- 2005(Publication Date)
- CRC Press(Publisher)
Another manifestation of the need for precision in the writing and the administration of criminal laws is contained in a series of U.S. Supreme Court cases beginning in 1995 and Criminal Law and Procedure 73 continuing through the present day. In what has become known as the Apprendi line of cases, named after Apprendi vs. New Jersey , 15 the Supreme Court of the United States has held that any aspect of a criminal law (other than a person’s history of prior convic-tions) that would operate to increase the maximum penalty affixed by the legislature is an element of the crime that must be proven to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt or be the subject of the defendant’s specific plea of guilty before such additional punishment can be meted out. 16 All of these principles requiring precision demonstrate that the government is not free to simply imprison people because of a generic sense that they are “bad” or that they somehow deserve moral sanction. Rather, the governed have given their consent to the imposition of criminal laws only when the governing body draws those laws with precision, dictates various elements to be proven, and lets the persons against whom the laws that are being enforced know exactly where the line is that they must not cross. The Jury Trial Once the legislative body has adequately defined the crime, the final determination as to whether the crime was committed is turned over, not to a body of governmental officials, but to a committee of the governed: the jury. Even before enactment of the Constitution, the jury trial had become an important protection from false accusations of crime for colonial Americans. A great deal of faith was placed in the common law jury as a means of providing this important protection of liberty. 5 (p. 132) Indeed, down through time, writers of great documents setting forth the rights of indi-viduals have consistently included the right to trial by jury in all such compilations.
eBook - PDF- Mauro Cappelletti, Monica Seccombe, Joseph H. Weiler, Mauro Cappelletti, Monica Seccombe, Joseph H. Weiler, Mauro Cappelletti, Monica Seccombe, Joseph H. Weiler, Mauro Cappelletti, Monica Seccombe, Joseph H. Weiler(Authors)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter(Publisher)
278 Jochen Abr. Frowein/Stephen Schulhofer/Martin Shapiro III. Towards Transnational Standards of Criminal Justice : The American Experience in Criminal Procedure (by Stephen Schulhofer) A. Introduction The relevance of criminal procedure to the study of legal integration cannot altogether be taken for granted. A diversity in laws affecting commerce, corpo-rate finance and even air pollution poses obvious difficulties for federal nations and for the interdependent countries of the international community. The human rights field is more intensely political and at the same time less likely to pose immediate obstacles simply because of a lack of uniformity. Even in this sphere, of course, there are some individual rights that call for uniformity at least at some minimum level of protection. The right to freedom of movement is an obvious example. The preceding section shows how the American expe-rience with freedom of speech has been greatly influenced by direct pressures for uniformity; local diversity in the standards for free speech is difficult to tol-erate when it affects debate on issues of national concern, and the economics of publishing make uniform standards at least as important to the press as they are to other industries serving a national market. 120 Criminal procedure presents an entirely different situation. Diversity in court processes and in the rights of the accused poses no obvious threat to the smooth flow of commerce or to other requirements of economic efficiency. Freedom of movement conceivably could be affected by perceptions about a given nation's procedures for dealing with persons should they become involved with the criminal courts, but it may be doubted whether any such effect has ever been substantial. Perhaps in no legal domain other than land law does uniformity as such have so low a priority as it does in criminal procedure.
eBook - ePub- Liling Yue(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Hart Publishing(Publisher)
shenpan) as ‘judge, judgement’.28 From the author’s knowledge, the Russian and Vietnamese criminal procedure laws also articulate such principles into their Codes.29 Michael Bayles, ‘Principles for Legal Procedure’ (1986) 5 Law and Philosophy 33.30 Xie Youping and Wan Yi, ‘Reflection and Reconstruction: On the Principles of Criminal Procedure Law’ (2002) 2 Criminal Law Review 472.31 Art 6 of the CPL.32 ibid.33 Art 5 of the CPL.34 Art 9 of the CPL.35 Art 13 of the CPL.36 Art 15 of the CPL.37 Art 37 of the Constitution.38 Art 38 of the Constitution.39 Art 37, the right of a person not to be unlawfully searched, and Art 39, the right against the unlawful search of, or intrusion into, a citizen’s residence.40 Art 40 of the Constitution.41 Art 130 of the Constitution.42 ibid.43 Chen Guangzhong et al, ‘On the Principle of Presumption of Innocence and Its Application in China’ (2013) 10 Journal of Law
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